Trouble On A Plane

So I had decided a while ago that I was done with making short films that this time around I was going to make a feature. But in order to get my certificate at UCLA I had to take this class called Advance Filmmaking. In this class, which is 24 weeks long, we get to make yet another short films. In fact, this class is pretty much the same class I took last summer, Concept to Screen, in which we learned the exact same stuff ... but in only 12 weeks!

Anyway, the film I'm about to shoot, this weekend actually, will be a project I've been thinking about for a while now. I want to make a short film in the style of my all time favorite director and master, Sir Alfred Hitchcock. Shooting it the way he would have using the same camera angles, shot sizes, colors, music, even the same type of actors, people who will remind the audience of Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Tippi Hedren, James Stewart and Cary Grant. Not very easy. Not only am I looking for very good actors but on top of that they need to look like the above mentioned stars. Or at least have the same charisma.

The film will be called 'Trouble On A Plane' and will be set, like the title suggest, on board of a private jet. Last year, as a joke, I asked Marq Lee, my DP, if he had access to a private plane because the guy has access to just anything you can imagine. Within minutes he told me he knew this lady that owned a mock up set of a plane, which she uses as a set to train flight attendants. In fact, she owns the only school in the country where flight attendant learn the etiquette rules for working on private chartered jets. Marq contacted her and last February, him and I went to visit the plane at Long Beach Airport. I could immediately see the possibilities and the Hitchcock idea came up again. What if a whole story was set in one single set? Hitchcock loved the challenge of having stories set in one single place. Think of the brilliant 'Lifeboat'. In fact, he once said he wanted to make a whole movie inside a telephone booth.

Okay, I'm off to my storyboard and my research on costumes again!